Cindy Sheehan

The Cindy Sheehan story is remarkable in that it has gotten a lot of media attention. In the recent past all kinds of people, including Max Cleland, have been treated shabbily by Bush's henchmen at the road to Bush's fake ranch, but with very little mainstream notice. Cindy Sheehan's vigil seems to be striking a chord with people, as well it should.

And indeed the cowardice, arrogance and mean-spiritedness of Mr. Bush when he is called upon to do the right thing, is breathtaking--or at least it would have been in a former America where arrogance and meanness by the rulers of the country, hiding in missile silos in Nebraska when America was under attack, and hiding on his ranchito from critics who ask to talk to him, had not become routine. But forcing the aggrieved mother of a dead soldier to stand in a bar ditch full of weeds and infested with fire ants, or be arrested if she ventures onto the road, is a surprising new low.

Well, not surprising. But a new low nevertheless, as is the threat to arrest her--if she does not leave by Thursday--for exercising her first amendment rights to peaceably assemble and petitition our government for a redress of grievances.

She was apparently told she would become a threat to national security on that day. When asked by an interviewer how she felt about going to jail, and if it would it be a first, she said, "Yes. It would be the first time, and I am ready to go. The only way they will get me out of there is if he meets with me, or the end of August, or when I am arrested."
She added, "But if I get arrested and I am let out before the end of August, I will go back."

Apparently about 3 dozen protesters were with her yesterday. As the Thursday deadline approaches, I suspect more will appear. I think Bush will back off on this--surely he does not want to turn a public relations problem into a public relations disaster. But with Bush and his team, you never know. They seem to be totally out of touch with reality.

Their more likely response is to try to crank up the slime machine which has worked so well for them in the past. There has already been some of this, with the Drudge Report claiming that she has flipflopped in her support of the war. A random blogsample from Technorati immediately turns over a rock and finds someone underneath named Bob Newman, whom I have never heard of, but who seems to be deranged, with the headline "A Mother Insults Her Fallen Son."

Here's the first paragraph:

Cindy Sheehan does not believe those filthy ragheads and camel jockeys in Iraq deserve freedom. Nor does she believe they should be allowed to live in peace or be able to sleep at night without wondering if their genocidal dictator’s bloodthirsty henchmen are going to kick their door in and drag the entire family off to a grisly torture chamber, where the parents will be made to watch their children be repeatedly raped and sodomized and finally blinded and dismembered while still alive.

You see here what Bush's slime machine is capable of. Such immoral and disgusting slanders worked well enough with John Kerry and Max Cleland, even though both were actual war heroes. But they were politicians. Will it work on a woman whose son was killed in Bush's war?

I guess I still have enough faith in Americans to believe it won't.